


Teen Wolf, Season 3, Episode 7, Currents

by TheSomewhatRamblingReviewer



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Analysis, Episode Review, Episode: s03e07 Currents, Meta, Nonfiction, Season/Series 03, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-18
Updated: 2018-10-18
Packaged: 2019-08-03 22:17:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16334279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSomewhatRamblingReviewer/pseuds/TheSomewhatRamblingReviewer
Summary: Warning: Contains spoilers for the episode and the rest of the series. Complete.





	Teen Wolf, Season 3, Episode 7, Currents

Open to Melissa helping with accident victims in the hospital.

Scott has brought her food. Explaining neither of the doctors needed are showing up, she coaxes a woman begging for pain relief into sitting down.

Then, Scott has a moment I both like and don’t. Sitting down, he tells the woman he read, sometimes, human contact can help with the pain. When she gives no objection, he holds her hand to absorbs some of her pain.

She looks at him in shocked awe.

On the one hand, in this instance, I truly believe this was done with the best of intentions. Scott saw a person in pain, he offered to help, and then, he did. If I had to the ability to take pain and believed doing so wouldn’t pose any danger to the people I was taking it from, I would.

Yet, Scott is wearing stripes in this scene.

Melissa said giving something for the pain without the doctor present could complicate things. She wasn’t just talking about adverse effects to medication. There’s a reason why doctors ask the level of pain a person is in. What if whoever helps this woman later misses something due to her not showing the proper symptoms for whatever is actually wrong?

In addition, it’s later revealed utilising the pain drain usually means taking life.

What Isaac did for the dog was great. The dog was going to die soon no matter what, and making it more comfortable was wonderful. Deaton did a good thing by teaching it in that one instance.

Teaching Scott and Isaac to do it to people and other shifters, however, isn’t good. Until Cora was literally dying, Derek never used it on any of the betas, nor did he teach them about it. Of course, that’s a fail on his part. If he’d taught them about it and explained why it shouldn’t be used, Isaac might have been a little more weary about Deaton and Scott, and maybe, Scott would have learned something new.

Next, holding Danny up, Ethan comes in yelling for help.

Meanwhile, the on-call doctor is stuck in traffic. She calls to say she might be later than ten minutes.

At the hospital, Ethan swears to Scott he didn’t do anything. Danny throws up, and Ethan identifies it as mistletoe.

In the doctor’s car, she flicks a moth/butterfly off her windshield, and one comes through her vent.

Back at the hospital, Melissa tries to shoo Scott and Ethan out of the hospital room. Ethan demands to know where all the doctors and other nurses are, and she explains it’s a full house. Scott asks how they can help. She tries to tell them they can’t, but when Scott asks in horror if Danny’s going to die, answering no, she starts giving orders.

In a nice character moment, Ethan is told to grab the scissors to cut Danny’s shirt, but he’s so worried, he simply rips it apart with his bare hands.

Melissa starts to give Danny an injection.

Meanwhile, the doctor is attacked by butmoths entering through the vent. There’s a brief glimpse of disfigured Jennifer in her mirror.

Back to Melissa, she does something to help Danny. The boys are all amazed, grateful, and in Scott’s case, proud.

Outside, Ethan follows Scott. “I know you’re not gonna believe me, but I didn’t do anything.”

Scott points out the twins immediately targeted Lydia and Danny when they first appeared. In response, Ethan says no one’s going to hurt Danny, because, they’ve discovered Lydia is the important one.

This is hilarious. ‘But no one is going to hurt my target, because, it’s my brother’s target that might be selected for whatever plans our insane alpha has.’

On a different note, this scene makes it seem like Lydia and Danny were targeted due to Scott, and that’s definitely his narrative bias peeking in. Scott seems to genuinely like Danny, but I wouldn’t say he particularly cares about him. He did help stop Derek and the betas from killing Lydia, but he neither likes nor cares about her as a person.

Originally, the alphas were going to come due kanima Jackson. I’m not sure if that ever really changed or not. They may or may not suspect Lydia of being supernatural, but she’s Jackson’s ex-girlfriend. Danny was his best friend, and likewise, Deucalion may or may not suspect Danny of being supernatural. Ethan clearly views Danny as completely human, but I’m not sure if Aiden suspected/knew about Lydia being supernatural or not.

This conversation is interrupted by the doctor’s car crashing into the parking lot.

Scott and Ethan find it empty save for a butmoth.

After the credits, Stiles, Scott, and Melissa are talking to Sheriff S about the two missing doctors. He shoos them away to let him take Melissa’s statement in private.

Scott uses his werewolf hearing to hear someone on the phone tell Sheriff S another body has been found.

At the second crime scene, Ethan is acting as Deucalion’s guide werewolf, and Chris is also in the crowd.

Meanwhile, Derek is sleeping sitting up when the loft’s alarm goes off. He and Cora discover, somehow, in what can’t have been more than a minute, someone has left the alpha sign on his window.

I feel compelled to point out he was literally less than twenty feet from it.

I believe this happened, but I also believe it all happened a little more realistically than it’s playing out on-screen.

He explains the alphas will come during the night.

At the McCall household, Melissa wakes up to see someone in her room. For some reason, I thought it was Peter, but no, Scott is sleeping in a chair, and Isaac is sleeping on the floor.

“Really, boys? Boys!”

Both Isaac and Scott jump up.

Daniel Sharman is incredibly talented at bringing the comedy when it’s called for, and I haven’t seen him in anything recently, but here he naturally looks younger than he is. It’s striking how young Isaac looks during this scene.

“Uh, we were watching over you,” he explains.

“We wanted to make sure you weren’t the third sacrifice,” Scott adds.

She points out the flaw in their operation, namely, “But both of you were asleep.”

There’s a mini-argument over who was on watch last.

“My heroes,” she comments. Then, she points out she’s not an M.D.

Scott says it could be any type of healer, and she definitely qualified when she was helping Danny.

“Yeah, well, I’m not going to be anyone’s human sacrifice today, so, both of you, get your butts to school.”

The next scene has Jennifer substituting. She has a line about Harris being missing, and then, she corrects “sick.”

Stiles whispers the first doctor wasn’t strangled, but he did die of asphyxiation. Scott asks if he thinks the second doctor could still be alive. Stiles doesn’t know, but he’s worried about the over twenty doctors at the hospital.

Scott’s phone vibrates, and sure, after her stunt with the mass texting, Scott is able just to answer his phone in the middle of class.

I honestly don’t know if this is unreliable narration or Jennifer truly was this bad of a teacher.

It’s Deaton. Looking at a butmoth, he tells Scott he’s about to be taken, and he needs Scott to find him. Then, hanging up, he looks at the butmoths-covered windows.

Meanwhile, Isaac and Boyd enter Derek’s loft.

“Go back to school,” he orders.

“Well, actually, we can’t. Boyd and I, uh, are incredibly and unbelievably sick.”

“With what, brain damage?”

“Well, I have a migraine, and uh, Boyd here has, uh, explosive diarrhoea.”

Boyd rolls his eyes. “We’re here to protect you.”

Derek is sarcastic.

Making himself at home on a table and leafing through a book, Isaac says, “Actually, Boyd here came up with a plan.”

Boyd’s plan is to turn the loft into an electric minefield.

At the vet, Scott rushes in to find Sheriff S and Deputy Graeme. Sheriff S explains Stiles called right after Scott left school. Deaton’s gone, but his car is still in the parking lot. “Scott, I need you to tell me everything.”

Back at the loft, Boyd puts a running water hose on the floor. He declares anyone who comes in will get a shocking surprise.

“Especially someone’s who’s barefoot,” Isaac gleefully adds.

Over to the vet, Stiles has arrived. Sheriff S orders them back to school before going over to talk to Deputy Graeme.

Scott and Stiles discuss whether they should tell him everything, but before they can tell him anything, Morrell shows up. She plays the concerned sister to the police, but when she talks to Scott and Stiles, she declares no police will be able to find her brother. She says they need to enlist Lydia.

Over to the girl in question, Lydia is busy with Aiden when the fire alarm goes off. He wants to ignore it, but not down with this, she orders him to leave the classroom first. He does.

Before she can leave, Cora appears. “You don’t have very good taste in guys, do you?”

Well, as an Aiden/Lydia shipper, I’m biased, but on a purely objective level, no, until seasons 5 and 6, Lydia doesn’t. However, as much as I like Parrish, I try my best to ignore their romantic subplot in said seasons.

At the hospital, Melissa has on different scrubs than she did earlier. She and Sheriff S talk about the second doctor being found dead. Even though she’s an R.N. rather than someone whose job it is to discover how a person died, Melissa explains she knows how the doctors died. They go to the morgue.

Back in the classroom, Cora says Derek doesn’t want Lydia seeing Aiden, and therefore, Cora will rip Lydia’s tongue out if she catches them together again.

If Cora has decided to do this independently, I don’t really have a problem with it. If she was told to leave the loft and decided she’d give herself a project, fine.

However, if Derek actually put Cora up to this, I have a problem.

Since my last rant on how pointless the whole Cora aspect was (through no fault of Kane’s), I’ve started to wonder if Cora wasn’t a villain who ended up stealing Derek’s spark, and on the directions of Derek, Scott and Chris spun a different story to Alec.

Lydia isn’t putting up with this, and Cora gets uncomfortably physical. However, before things escalate, Stiles appears. He sends Scott a text saying he found Lydia.

Elsewhere, Scott hears a tapping sound.

In a different classroom, Stiles has set up an Ouija board for him, Cora, and Lydia to use. It doesn’t work due to the fact Lydia doesn’t know the answer. Just as I’m sure most of the audience did, she thought they were asking spirits.

“Well, do you know any spirits,” is Cora’s serious inquiry.

“Is she for real,” Lydia asks of Cora.

Okay, I like this. If the show had done more of Cora being ‘I’m a werewolf from a werewolf family’ to the others ‘yeah, well, most of us were raised human, and some of us still are’ it would have been good. One thing I did like about Malia was how her easy acceptance of her baser instincts and supernatural side clashed with the more restrained characters.

In an otherwise empty classroom, Scott finds Deucalion, and Deucalion suggests he could help find Deaton.

Back in the other classroom, Stiles gives Lydia Deaton’s keys in the hope she can sense something. Other than the keys being cold, she has nothing.

Going back to Scott, Deucalion says, if Scott can take the cane from him, he’ll tell Scott where Deaton is. Scott fails in getting the cane, and Deucalion says he’s not responsible for the sacrifices. Then, he says he can either save Deaton or protect Derek, but someone will die tonight. He gives Scott a clue to Deaton’s location, “Let the current guide you.”

Now, Stiles is trying to get Lydia to do automatic writing. She starts to draw the tree she drew in Unleashed, and he clarifies he means actual words.

What if Deaton has been tied to a tree like some of the other sacrifices had been? Knowing what the tree looked like would be a start.

Lydia says they should really be talking to Danny, and appearing, Scott says Danny was a target but not a sacrifice.

In the morgue scene, I’m distracted by the fact it’s apparently a big mystery how someone could suffocate without being strangled. A pillow over the face, water inhalation, asthma attack, sleep apnoea, and drug overdose are a few ways I learned about in less than five minutes. Forget those occupying a healer role, anyone with access to Wikipedia or a physical library could find out all the various causes behind suffocation.

This said, I do like this scene. I had hoped Sheriff S and Melissa would get romantically involved, but even with the fact they didn’t, it’s nice to see them growing closer and being an awesome mystery-solving duo.

Melissa explains the victims were suspended by their wrists, and they had to keep pulling themselves up in order to breathe. This is intercut with Deaton in such a position.

Back at the school, the foursome is walking in the hall, and Cora is carrying books. Is she carrying them for someone, or is she actually enrolled in the school, now? Scott sends Stiles to visit Danny in the hospital.

At the loft, Isaac asks if the electrified water will kill the alphas, and Boyd expresses a hope it will.

Over at Allison’s, her conversation with Scott is interrupted by the sound of Chris arriving.

They hide in a closet, and a certain part of Scott’s anatomy rises to the occasion. They share a half-kiss. Chris leaves, and they go to his office. Allison uses a special light to show Scott a map of all the places sacrifices were taken and where they were found. The alarming part comes from the fact there have only been six sacrifices, but there are twelve markings.

They hear Chris come in, and Allison pretends to do homework in her room as Scott sneaks out.

In the hospital, instead of just quietly going through Danny’s stuff, Stiles tries to make sure he’s asleep in such a way he causes Danny to semi-wake up. Danny asks why Stiles is going through his stuff, and Stiles repeatedly insists Danny is just dreaming. Danny logically asks why he’d dream of Stiles going through his stuff.

“I don’t know that, Danny, okay? It’s your dream. Take responsibility for it.”

He finds a science report on currents. “Oh, Danny boy, you might have actually found something here.”

And mirrorverse or something might be in play. Despite the sun shining through Danny’s window a minute ago, it’s now night. Scott is talking to Stiles over the phone, and Stiles says Danny was doing a project in chemistry for currents.

At the loft, Isaac notices a light is out. Then, all the lights go out. Without taking off his shoes and socks and/or rolling up his jeans, Derek carefully steps into the water, walks in front of the window, and faces the door.

“Derek,” Isaac says. “What do we do, now?”

Eyes glowing red, Derek answers, “We fight.”

Kali appears, and Isaac and Boyd get behind Derek. She reveals the twins have Jennifer, and he motions with his head. Isaac and Boyd obediently remove themselves so that Derek and Kali can fight one-on-one.

“I’m gonna rip your throat out, with my teeth.”

When he said it to Stiles, the threat was ineffectual; it came across as someone young grasping for straws and trying to sound threatening to someone they knew they likely had no chance of truly scaring. Now, however, despite Kali being even less scared and impressed than Stiles was, there’s a genuine menace to the words.

Interestingly, though, both times he’s uttered the threat, he’s been terrified. He was scared of Stiles abandoning him to death, and he’s scared of Jennifer being killed. The difference is there are some lines he won’t cross to save himself. To save others, though, he’ll go to extremes.

At the vet, the foursome is looking over Danny’s project. It has a note from Harris strongly suggesting Danny choose a different topic.

They realise Deaton is in the same vault Cora, Boyd, and Erica were kept in.

There’s a scene of Deaton losing strength.

Then, Cora announces Boyd just texted to tell her the plan didn’t work due to the power being cut.

Instead of a werewolf taking an alleged human to the vault and another werewolf taking the other alleged human to Derek’s, Scott sends them all to Derek’s. He plans to go to the vault alone.

At the loft, Derek and Kali fight, and Jennifer screams.

Meanwhile, Stiles is a bad driver. He stares at Lydia instead of focusing on the road.

There’s more fighting.

At the vault, Scott finds Deaton surrounded by a circle of mountain ash. Lydia’s a banshee, and Stiles is something. However, from Scott’s POV, they’re both human. Even when Lydia’s revealed to be a banshee, she can still disrupt mountain ash. This is why bringing one of them or Allison along would have been helpful.

It’s not a stretch whoever’s performing the sacrifices knows about the werewolves in town and the fact Deaton’s connected to them. Mountain ash doesn’t seem to be an incredibly rare, hard to obtain substance, either.

Also, there’s a rolling cart nearby. Has any shifter ever tried to disrupt mountain ash by using physical objects. I doubt they’d be able to do it with a shoe, but could Scott roll the cart back and forth over it until the line broke?

Back at the loft, Isaac and Boyd start to go fight the twins to try to free Jennifer, but Derek orders, “No!”

Back in the vault, Scott tries to push through the barrier.

At the loft, Derek and Kali fight some more.

In the vault, Deaton sees Scott’s eyes turn bright red, and Scott is repelled onto the floor.

Then, Sheriff S appears. If he had seen Scott struggling to cross, this would be one thing, but he clearly wasn’t in the background when it happened. He decides to shoot the rope, and there’s no excuse for doing something so irresponsibly dangerous, especially when he’s presumably been extensively trained in gun safety.

The proper response would be to go cut/manually untie the ropes. Even if a person wants to argue he saw the strange black circle and wasn’t sure what it was, this still not only risks getting gunpowder and the bullet/shell casing on the strange material and potentially causing a negative reaction, it risks Deaton falling onto the unknown material.

At Derek’s building, the trio starts pulling levers, and Isaac gets a text from Stiles. He rushes to the twins, and they abandon hostage duty. As he’s shielding Jennifer, in an act reminiscent of Scott forcing Derek to give Gerard the bite, the twins and Kali force Derek to stab Boyd with his claws.

One of them, most likely Ethan, shows subtle shame. Kali tells Derek he has until the next full moon to join. The alphas leave, and Isaac’s reaction to all this is strange.

I don’t necessarily blame him for not trying to stop them. Derek made it clear Jennifer’s safety was a priority, and he just witnessed Boyd’s fatal stabbing. He could be in shock. If so, sitting there and protectively clinging to Jennifer would make sense.

However, he doesn’t look shocked, broken up, or even angry.

Derek is panicked and overwhelmed, but Boyd assures him it’s okay. He says being a werewolf was worth this.

In response, Derek apologises.

He knows it’s not enough, but it’s all he can do. He is truly sorry. He went about it the wrong way, selfishness did colour his motives, but he genuinely meant the bite as a gift to them. It was his way of trying to help these children who desperately needed help.

Boyd has a flashback to Erica in the vault. She hopes the lunar eclipse will make them stronger. It’s implied Kali kills her, and her last word is, “Boyd,” as she reaches out to where he is off-screen.

Boyd and Erica’s last thoughts were of one another. Aw. I’ll definitely always view them as soulmates.

Crying, Cora runs to Boyd.

Stiles gently, tentatively puts his hand on Derek’s shoulder.

As Scott said earlier, sometimes, human contact can help with the pain, and as Deaton once told Isaac, sometimes, taking a little bit of pain away can go a long way.

Stiles can’t do much, but here, this is who Stiles is. He’ll do anything for those in his inner circle, but he’ll do a lot for those not in it, too. He liked Boyd, and this hurts him, too, but he tries his best to offer comfort, to ease any of Derek's pain he can.

Lydia is naturally upset. Isaac and Jennifer, however, watch rather stoically.

Elsewhere, Chris is yelling at Gerard. He says something about Gerard owing a lot of favours and penance before he’s redeemed in Chris’s eyes.

Did Gerard ever actually say he wanted to be redeemed in Chris’s eyes? If he did, did Chris actually believe him?

Oh, Chris.

Chris storms out, and Allison appears. She asks if Gerard is surprised to see her. Smiling proudly, he answers, “Only surprised it’s taken you this long.”

Back to Deaton and Scott, Sheriff S explains found them by doing good old-fashion detective work. When he goes to call an ambulance, Deaton tells Scott about the red eyes. He says, in rare instances, a beta can become an alpha without having to steal or take the power. He continues he believed this would happen ever since he learned Scott was bitten. Then, he announces Deucalion is after Scott, not Derek.

No, Deucalion isn’t. He clearly enjoys irritating Scott, but everything shows he want Derek. He’s not trying to get Scott to kill Isaac or any of the others. A later episode has Morrell imply Deucalion wants to prevent Scott from being a true alpha, but this is when she might have believed Scott was going to kill her, and so, she tried to make him believe it was in his best interest not to.

As for the other part, Deaton believed it would happen, because, he set out to make this happen. I’m not sure how he made Scott into an alpha, but this was his doing, not Scott’s. I’m just not sure why, and I don’t think meta writers have ever come to a definite conclusion.

Fin.


End file.
